Congratulations to the four following researchers who were awarded ISPRN project grants for 2015. These grants have been kindly funded by Grand Pacific Health.

Dr Dora von Conrady, Huon Valley Health Centre

Project Title: Do health literacy levels affect the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use in rural Australian communities?

The aims of this project are to assess the rates of CAM usage in a rural Australian population and assess whether there is a correlation between CAM use and health literacy levels. A pilot study has already been completed in a single rural practice in Tasmania and preliminary results are indicating certain trends that warrant investigation on a larger scale. This area has not been studied in a rural Australian population.

Dr Dora von Conrady will be recruiting ten general practices to distribute 100 surveys to patients, to ascertain whether there is a correlation between CAM use and health literacy levels.

Interested in getting involved?

If you are interested in involving your practice please contact ISPRN co-ordinator Alyssa Munkman on (02) 42215819 or amunkman@uow.edu.au

Dr Munther Zureigat, Milton Medical Centre

Project title: Rural GP referral process for Isotretinoin treatment in moderate to severe acne.

Acne Vulgaris is one of the most common Dermatological presentations in General practice. Acne Scarring is a known major consequence of late referrals for Isotretinoin treatment which is a drug that can only be prescribed by Dermatologists in moderate to severe acne. This has been shown to be very effective in preventing scarring if started at the optimal time. Acne scarring has a long term psychological impact on patients, mainly adolescents and is strongly related to poor body image, depression, and possibly suicide. The project will be looking into the barriers and facilitators for optimal GP to Dermatologist referral for Isotretinoin treatment in regional and rural areas. This research could provide a good assessment of the competency level of dealing with a very common dermatological problem and hopefully identify the barriers Rural GPs face in the management of this common presentation.

Dr Zureigat will be interviewing 20-25 GPs to ascertain the barriers and facilitators for optimal GP to Dermatologist referral for Isotretinoin treatment in regional and rural areas.

Interested in getting involved?

If you are a GP and are interested in participating in a telephone interview please contact ISPRN co-ordinator Alyssa Munkman on (02) 42215819 or amunkman@uow.edu.au

Dr Stephen Barnett/Dr Adam Hodgkins, Bowral Street Medical Practice/Junction Street Medical Practice

Project Title: Demonstrating the value of raw clinical Electronic Medical Data for primary care research: a benchmarking study on chronic disease prevalence in primary care.

Electronic Medical Data is a potentially powerful source of primary care research data which is under-utilised. The reasons for this are concerns about data validity and process and technical issues regarding access to this data. This study builds on the recent EMD project benchmarking GP EMD data against BEACH data. The pilot benchmarking study demonstrated a valid approach to accessing electronic medical data from GP databases (Best Practices), showing a high concordance between 6 ISPRN practices and the BEACH dataset for patient encounters, demographics and total prescription data.

The 6 ISPRN practices that participated in the first phase will be benchmarked against the BEACH dataset for the prevalence of chronic disease in primary care.

Interested in getting involved?

If you are interested in getting your practice involved with this project please contact ISPRN co-ordinator Alyssa Munkman on (02) 42215819 or amunkman@uow.edu.au

Ms Elizabeth Lyons, Connections Private Psychology Practice

Project title: Stage 2: The Trialling for General Practice of the Major Depression PDA

Stage one of this project has involved the development of a patient decision aid for major depression.

The second stage of this project will involve trialling the patient decision aid in three patient focus groups and incorporating feedback back in to the decision aid. The project will explore whether, when used within a shared decision-making framework, the depression decision aid may increase patient expectations of treatment adherence and depression recovery, by increasing the congruence between patients’ values, beliefs and expectations, the strength of their treatment preferences and the treatment option/s provided.

Interested in getting involved?

If you are interested in involving your patients in a patient focus group please contact ISPRN co-ordinator Alyssa Munkman on (02) 42215819 or amunkman@uow.edu.au

Dear Isprners –

Exciting news! One of our ISPRN projects has just been published in BMC Family Practice. This project headed up by A/Prof Karen Charlton and undertaken in three of our ISPRN practices looked at the feasibility of malnutrition screening in elderly patients. Please follow the link to the article. Congratulations to all of the researchers and practices involved.

BMCFamilypracticeAliza2014

Prof Andrew Bonney

We would like to congratulate Dr Carl Mahfouz who was accepted for a poster presentation at the RACGP Conference for General Practice 2014, held at the Adelaide Convention Centre from the 9-11 October.

Carl presented preliminary findings of his current study titled “GP attitudes towards hospital discharge summaries”. A photo of Carl and his poster are shown below. If you would like further information about this project contact Mrs Alyssa Munkman on amunkman@uow.edu.au.

Please join the Illawarra and Southern Practice Research Network (ISPRN) staff in congratulating the successful ISPRN researchers who summited abstracts to the Primary Health Care Research and  Information Service (PHCRIS) Conference held in Canberra from the 23-25 of July 2014.

All three ISPRN member led projects were accepted as either a poster presentation or a podium presentation.  Details of their success are listed below:

• Dr Lucie Stanford, Prof Andrew Bonney, Dr Rowena Ivers,  Ms Bridget Dijkmans-Hadley: “Another pair of eyes in the room: do patients want a chaperone for intimate examinations?” – accepted as a podium presentation
• Dr Fiona Williams, Dr Carl Mahfouz, Dr Russell Pearson, Dr Rowena Ivers: “The attitude of patients over 65yrs to ceasing long term sleeping tablets”- accepted as a poster presentation
• Dr Duncan MacKinnon, Prof Andrew Bonney, Mr Darren Mayne,  Dr Stephen Barnett, Ms Bridget Dijkmans-Hadley: “Weighing in general practice: Does it have an impact on weight management?” – accepted as a poster presentation

Further congratulations goes to Dr Duncan MacKinnon and his team whose poster won the PHCRIS Best Poster Award!

It was a very successful conference for ISPRN with the results of current research projects being introduced into the primary care academic environment.

Dr Lucie Stanford presenting her paper presentation “Another pair of eyes in the room: do patients want a chaperone for intimate examinations?”

Dr Fiona Williams and Dr Carl Mahfouz presenting their poster for the project titled: The attitude of patients over 65yrs to ceasing long term sleeping tablets.

Dr Duncan MacKinnon and ISPRN Coordinator Bridget Dijkmans-Hadley with the PHCRIS Best Poster-Weighing in general practice: Does it have an impact on weight management?

Check out our upcoming events page for new events and funding opportunities. Just click here: https://www.uowblogs.com/isprn/upcoming-events/ .

ISPRN has now released an ISPRN News Autumn 2014 edition. Please click here to view a copy, or head to our webpage: http://smah.uow.edu.au/medicine/research/.

We would love to hear your feedback about our ISPRN Newsletter, what other articles or information would you like to be included in ISPRN News? Please email your feedback to us on isprn-enquiries@uow.edu.au.

ISPRN would like to thank the people who attended the ISPRN Research Development Workshop which aimed to build participants knowledge of introductory research methodologies and critical analysis of the literature, and will specifically focus on qualitative research. We received an overwhelming response from people who wanted to attend this year and received fantastic feedback from attendees on the day!

We will be making these resources available to members in the research modules component of the blog, or alternatively you can email isprn-enquiries@uow.edu.au for a copy of the resources from the day.

Looking forward to another successful workshop in 2014.
With regards,
Bridget
ISPRN Research Coordinator

Illawarra and Southern Practice Research Network (ISPRN) would like to invite all practice managers of  practices involved in the research network to lunch.

The lunch will be held on Tuesday 15 October 11.30am-1.30pm at The University of Wollongong in the IHMRI building and will be a fantastic opportunity for the ISPRN team to meet with you in person and to answer any questions that you may have about practice based research.

Practice managers are key to ensuring that practice based research projects continue in their success and this lunch will be an opportunity for us to thank you for your facilitation so far.

Please RSVP to Alyssa Munkman amunkman@uow.edu.au

Project Wrap Up
What is the effect on weight by regularly weighing 20-70 year old attendees in general practice?

Dr Duncan Mackinnon, a GP from Bega, has been conducting a study to assess whether the weighing of patients at every consultation (over an eight-month period), followed by usual care, has an impact on healthy weight maintenance of 20-70 year old general practice attendees. The pilot study has involved 285 patients from six practices and will be winding up in November this year (Congratulations Duncan!).

What’s happening next?
Data Analysis
Following the intervention study the mean weight gain of the intervention sample will then be compared with the average population weight gain to determine if the intervention had an effect on intervention patients’ weight maintenance.

Evaluation of the Study
An evaluation of the study will also be conducted and aims to interviews key participants including the patients, GP’s, reception staff and practice managers to at exploring their experiences of the weight management study.

We are looking forward to the next stages of the project and wish to thank all the practices who have been involved in this study.  We would also welcome those practices to let us know if they would like to be involved in further analysis of the study. Please contact ISPRN on, email: isprn-enquiries@uow.edu.au OR phone: (02) 42215958.

 Project Update- Electronic Medical Data Interest Group

What is the EMD?
The EMD is a group of practitioners interested in the use of Electronic Data from medical  records for research and practice improvement.

What are we doing?
Up until recently, the group has been focussing on looking at the how what and why of data collection, particularly in relation to answering some practical questions. The first of these is “What happens if we stop statins in the over 75 age group”? This project has now become the starting point of a Masters research project for Dr Adam Hodgkins- well done and good luck!

A big thank you for the effort so far from Prof Andrew Bonney, Dean Denman from Best Practice, Darren Mayne from NSW Health Dr Jeff Pinkstone and Dr Lucie Stanford.

Future Directions
The main focus of the group now is engaging a group of interested practices to build a network of eGP data. Involved practices will help to focus the direction. Options include doing local data searches to help reflect on clinical practice for a single GP or single practice, through to developing tools to aggregate this data to form a bigger dataset for answering clinical questions of interest of practitioners.

I will be visiting the UK in September for a conference and will be meeting with the UK Big Data group to see if we can apply any of their experience in our local area.

Getting Involved
If you’d like to know more, get involved and start maximising the value of the data in your practices and particularly if you have questions that you think could be answered by this approach over time, please contact Alyssa Munkman isprn-enquiries@uow.edu.au.

Dr Stephen Barnett